Excel for Journalists

Steve DoigArizona State University

USA

What is “data”? Information in table form Columns are the variables

Name, date, time, address, age, etc. Rows are the records

Persons, incidents, etc.

Information, but not data Steve Doig is a 62-year-old

professor who teaches at Arizona State University.

Now it’s data!

Last name

First name

Age Title City

DoigSteve 62

Professor Phoenix

Jones Bob 45 Reporter Miami

Smith Tom 34 Reporter New York

Why use Excel? Good stories can be found in the

patterns of data Human mind alone can’t see the

patterns in large sets of data Excel has tools to help us see the

patterns in data in table form Excel can handle large tables

More than 16.000 columns More than 1 million rows

A blank spreadsheet

What Excel can do Import data from many formats Sort data by one or more variables Filter data to show only selected

rows Transform data using functions

and formulas Summarize data into categories

Importing data Common formats

*.xls (or *.xlsx) Fixed-width text Delimited text (comma, tab, etc) *.dbf files (old dBase) HTML tables

Data Import Wizard will help

Delimited text example

Fixed-width text

Sorting a table

Now it’s sorted

Filtering: Data…Filter…Autofilter

Pick a category…

…and see just that

Transforming data Math functions

Add, subtract, multiply, divide Average, median, maximum, minimum

Date/Time functions Day of week, days between

Text functions Extract parts of text strings Search and replace text

Function Wizard (ƒx)

Function Wizard (ƒx)

Summarizing data We often want to take a big

collection of individual records and pile them into categories

Trick: Visualize the piece of paper that would give you the answer you seek

Tool: Pivot tables

Pivot table example Data: Region, town name, crimes,

etc. Question: “How many crimes

occurred in each region?” Visualize the piece of paper that

would answer the question

Building a pivot table

Pivot table

Sorted pivot table

EXERCISE!

www.public.asu.edu/~sdoig/UNL

(get Excel crime data)